This sponsored post is produced in association with NVIDIA.

The power of GPU-fueled technologies has rocketed a large number of companies to success. Now with Deep Learning — the use of sophisticated, multi-level “deep” neural networks — more research and investment is producing ever-more impressive innovations.

Just see for yourself. At the Emerging Companies Summit — coming up March 18th in San Jose — 17 CEOs will take the stage to describe their innovative GPU-based businesses to investors, media, and members of the tech industry.

There will be two main events that day. The first one, called Show and Tell, will feature five companies that each have a 20-minute window to demo their product and answer questions about their company’s vision.

A second event, the Early Stage Challenge, will feature 12 startups vying for a $100,000 cash prize.

From the audience perspective, it’s a rare chance to get a better understanding of GPU-powered technologies, business strategies, and growth opportunities. Here are the five companies you’ll get a chance to see up close at Show and Tell:

1. JIBO, Cynthia Breazeal, Founder and CEO

Described by the company as the “world’s first family robot,” Jibo looks straight out of Pixar, but the plans that founder and Chief Scientist Breazeal has for the desktop social robot are very real. Jibo first appeared on the scene last summer as an Indiegogo crowd fund-raiser, bringing in the tidy sum of $2.3 million, and just recently announced it’s raised $25.3 million in Series A funding. It’s also taken almost 5,000 pre-orders to date, which are expected to start shipping at the end of this year. What will Jibo do? When fully realized, it will act as your personal assistant providing messages and reminders, serve as the family photographer, tell stories to the kids, and even order pizza. The company’s goal is for Jibo to “help families manage, care for, coordinate, and connect with greater ease, engagement, efficiency, and fun.”

2. Herta Security, Javier Rodriguez Saeta, CEO

In an era where security has become a major growth industry, technologies to refine facial recognition are in high demand. Herta Security is on the cutting edge of real-time face recognition and has developed a number of solutions, including Biosurveillance and BioFinder — high-performance video-surveillance specially designed to simultaneously identify subjects in a crowded and changeable environment. On the non-security side, Herta has developed BioMarketing, which can identify parameters such as gender, approximate age, use of glasses, and various facial expressions to enable advertisers to reach an identified audience with a specific message.

3. Clarifai, Matthew Zeiler, Founder and CEO

Clarifai amps up image recognition technology with deep learning software that classifies and auto-tags images according to tens of thousands of categories, objects, and tags. It also serves up similar images for enhanced search capability. Founder Zeiler says that “Clarifai’s deep learning systems have improved orders of magnitude in speed, vocabulary size, and memory footprint, and have expanded beyond images to extract knowledge from all forms of data.”

4. Mirriad, Mark Popkiewicz, CEO

Mirriad’s computer vision technology allows it to offer advertisers seamless brand integration across all screens in videos, old television reruns and film — after the fact. Indeed, the company won an Academy award in 2013 for Advancement in Technology. If you’re thinking product placement, you’re right. But this is product placement on steroids, where content owners, brands, and distributors can come together for total win-wins. Mirriad has deals with major U.S. studios and has worked with top broadcasters in 20 countries.

5. Paracosm, Amir Rubin, CEO

With core technology called a spatial intelligence platform, Paracosm is enabling robots and augmented reality applications to understand and interact with the real world. Their core technology is a spatial intelligence platform that provides the tools to collaboratively capture interior spaces, generate 3D maps, and create immersive experiences. Imagine never getting lost inside a building with detailed 3D maps transforming the way we navigate. Or playing a video game not just in your living room, but with your living room. Or making 60s sci-fi movie scenes of robots fetching your keys and drinks a reality. By enabling robotic perception using 3D maps, Paracosm is helping robots understand the shape of the world.

The Emerging Companies Summit, held Wednesday, March 18, 2015, is part of the annual GPU Technology Conference, taking place at the San Jose Convention Center in Silicon Valley from March 17 – 20. The Summit provides companies with an opportunity to present their technologies to potential investors, partners, customers, analysts and media. 

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